Henry Bond

Henry Bond trained at the Surrey Institute of Arts and Design and at Goldsmiths' College in London. His work, The Cult of the Street (photographs of London), is a remarkable project for our times. As he points out, we exist in a social framework where fashion and style play a role in everything we do. The central theme in The Cult of the Street is the quest for more and the people who live for their lifestyle. It is about the idealization of status in 1980s society adapted to the 1990s. Bond drifts through the crowded streets of London, through its teeming department stores, boutiques and shoe shops, its nightclubs and dance floors. He references street photography in his pictures of urban rhythm, advertising photography in his pictures of window displays, Brassaï or Bill Brandt in his night scenes and, at times, the relentless directness of the CCTV camera monitoring the doorways to the temples to consumerism. This is urban culture seen through the photographic styles, genres and conventions of decades past. It is a project about the pursuit of consumerism, fitness and fun by a hedonistic society, and at the same time it is a photographic work about the way we look at that society, about its mediafication and the photographic mythologizing of events.